THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS THE CRUCIBLE RULES SYSTEM HANDBOOK

Page 2

Operation Night Crow 2: All or Nothing

Click thumbnail to enlarge All photos by Tony Francis & John Treadaway

SUDDEN DEATH The problems was that Tony Francis – as many of us claim – has an appalling record with dice throws. We were using a shared pool of my much vaunted ‘casino’ dice (none of that “these are my lucky dice” nonsense in my games...) and – although his best (and most modern) unit did activate in the first turn – the other two units spent five whole turns rolling a succession of low numbers and, in consequence, did not activate until the last minute. Sure, my main attack force got all sorts of whatsit kicked out of it (as I largely expected) with their diversionary frontal attack, however my secondary – and rather lighter force – landed at the other end of the table, nearer to their target objective (the space port with some juicy targets in the shape of grounded space ships) without any functional opposition. For three turns... Now entertaining as it was to unload weapon systems and troops carrying anti-tank missiles from flying APCs into space ships and static, non-activated AFVs, it began to pall, even for me! It was also pretty frustrating for my opponent for his whole game at one end of the table to be based around a series of ‘all or nothing’ dice rolls and that never makes for a good game. Especially when the rolls meant ‘nothing’. There’s a more extensive game ‘blow-by’blow’ later on but I was unhappy with how the game played out for Tony: I thought I’d “done ‘im wong!” However, in the post game debrief, it took only seconds to work out that the solution had been staring me in the face and yet I’d missed it.